Articles by: Judith Harris

  • Op-Eds

    With the Jubilee Year, Pilgrims walk Italy again

    The Jubilee Year called by Pope Francis begins in less than six weeks, and, despite tedious delays, the Roman city fathers are forging ahead with their preparations. Expecting literally millions of visitors after the year opens Dec.8, city hall is repairing the stone balustrades on the Tiber River bridges, tidying up public parks and public toilets, laying a few new tram rails, setting up medical facilities, repairing sidewalks and so on, for another dozen projects. Particularly important among these is the creation of designated pilgrim walks to Rome's historic churches.

    An interesting leitmotif of the preparations is the revival of interest in the traditional pilgrims' routes that lead into Rome from North Europe. Speaking to the press last Saturday, Dario Franceschini, Italy's Minister for Culture and Tourism, announced that, "The year 2016 is now formally designated as the Year of National Pilgrimage Walking." Indeed, a perhaps surprising number will arrive in the same way medieval pilgrims did: on foot.

    As Franceschini went on to say, Italy offers some 4,100 miles of walks, north and south, for "spiritual pilgrimages," but which are also suitable for the growing number of those interested in slow tourism as a way to enjoy Italy's natural world and rich culture.

    Earlier Franceschini had told a reporter from the Catholic daily Avvenire that, "The extraordinary Jubilee Year called by Pope Francis brings many for prayer and faith, but it can also can contribute to making Italy a waystation toward a more serene future, through knowledge of its cultural heritage." Visitors who usually flock to the main centers of attraction, like Rome, Florence and Venice, are now discovering the less well-known places. This is not merely about conventional tourism or its financial benefits, he went on to say.

    "These are the places," said Franceschini, "which vaunt our huge wealth of history and culture -- the churches, sanctuaries and ancient 'borghi' [town centers], plus the extraordinary natural landscape of the entire Italian peninsula."

    Foremost in Italy among the newly popular walking routes, and now beginning to rival the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which attracts over 200,000 people a year, is the medieval Via Francigena, so named for its being the road pilgrims walked to Rome from France (though it actually began in Canterbury, England).

    Some years back this reporter was surprised to come upon thirty-some pilgrims from northern Italy walking toward Rome on a road near Sutri, a famous stop on the Via Francigena route. Aged from ten to perhaps seventy, they were singing and dragging along a huge wooden cross. 

    Today such a sight would be less surprising. Sutri, first Etruscan and then a Roman town, stands on a high plateau overlooking the narrows of a canyon through which passes the ancient Via Cassia. Under the Romans the town was a fortress to block marauders before they could attack Rome itself, 41 miles distant. During the Middle Ages it became a major stop-over for Francigena pilgrims. Besides providing food and a bed, Sutri citizens specialized in making and mending pilgrims' worn-out leather shoes. Sutri shoemakers still take orders for hand-made footwear, particularly riding boots.

    The hilltop town still is a Francigena stop today, and it is not unusual to see pilgrims -- alone or on foot -- striding through the main square of the town, carrying a backpack and the traditional pilgrim's staff. A certain number wear lederhosen, showing that they have walked from Germany.

    Another day I met and spoke with a group of French women, who were not walking the entire Francigena, but stretches of it as they approached Rome. What makes this sight so fascinating is that it recalls the 13th century painted fresco of pilgrims still visible on a wall inside Sutri's Mithraic temple, carved deep into a rock wall but converted to a Christian place of worship.

    At Saturday's press conference Minister Franceschini was flanked by Mons. Liberio Andreatta, deputy chief of the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi (the Rome Pilgrim office of the Vicariate of Rome), and Giovanni Lolli, coordinator for tourism in the Italian regions. For months Italian church officials, together with representatives of publishing houses, have been meeting with Franceschini to plan the Italian contribution to the Jubilee Year. Among their suggestions is that, besides Rome, pilgrims consider calling at sanctuaries at Assisi in Umbria, dedicated to St. Francis; the medieval Marian shrine of Loreto in the Marches, dating from the time of the Crusades; and, in the Puglie region, the 11th century Monte Sant'Angelo, visited by Pope John Paul II in 1987.

    The tradition of Jubilee Years dates from the year 1300. 
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    Talking Money Matters with Renzi and Padoan

    ROME -- Italy's youthful Premier Matteo Renzi and his more mature Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan have both done an about-face over money. This is hardly surprising: money talk is difficult, and top economists worldwide quarrel about whether it is better to cut taxes so as to stimulate growth, or to keep one's house in order by curbing the national debt through high taxes.

     

    Nowhere does this debate matter more than in Italy, where a high earner with a salary of $400,000 hands over to the state almost 49% of his salary in taxes, according to a study made last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Of the 20 countries examined by this prestigious accountancy firm, Italians were the most severely taxed. Second in line was India, where 45% went to taxes, followed by the U.K., 43%, and France, 42%. In the U.S. the similarly well-to-do earner living in New York State paid much less in taxes, or just 39.5%. (If the reader wants to be truly tax exempt, consider Saudi Arabia, where barely 3.14% goes for taxes.)

     

     

    The current Italian debate in Parliament over a mega-finance bill called the "Stability Law" deals with various issues. Property taxes loom large. For all those owning their first home, says the pending government proposal, the despised property tax, the TASI, introduced in September 2014, is to be entirely eliminated. But then Premier Renzi had second thoughts. The latest version is that the new law will not apply to those owning "luxury homes."

     

     

    "People who own castles will have to pay," Renzi decided this week. The same will apply to all those owning luxury apartments, villas and "palazzi" -- technically, that is, those residences categorized as A1, A8 and A9. By numbers, this means that some 45,000 owners of up-market dwellings will continue to pay. Politically, Renzi's reversal was a tip of the hat toward the truculent left wing of his Partito Democratico. In money terms it means that their contributions should bring into government coffers E 90 million, or almost $103 million. This tax compromise had already been put into effect by three previous governments, those headed in turn by Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti and Enrico Letta. The debate is far from finished, however, for amendments to the proposed bill continue to pour in, including in the Senate.

     

     

    The second about-face was by Minister Padoan, who had initially opposed boosting the maximum amount of money which can be paid legally in cash to E 3,000 ($3,400). Among the objections to this item in the pending "Stability Law" was that easy cash transfer eases criminal activity. Initially Padoan agreed. "But I have now changed my mind after carefully looking into the question.... There is no real correlation between a limitation upon the amount of cash transferred and the dimensions of the submerged economy," he told a reporter for the financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore. "A more flexible cash limit can be beneficial for an economy like Italy's where electronic payments are less common than in other countries, such as France."

     

     

    Minister Padoan's extraordinarily broad background makes him Renzi's secret weapon. On TV he can seem gruff, but in person he is congenial and makes an effort to explain his positions, as this reporter can verify from my own recent meeting with him. Minister of the Economy and Finances since 2014, he had been director of the Italian section of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 through 2004, and after June 2007, Deputy Secretary General of the OECD. Nor is this his first experience in Italian governance; he has had stints as economic advisor to two previous prime ministers, Partito Democratico hard-liner Massimo D'Alema and the more moderate (and technical) Giuliano Amato.

     

     

    His opinions therefore carry weight. In his view, in the early years of this decade Italy's priority was to get the deficit under control. Today, he believes, the "imperative" is to relaunch employment and economic growth while at the same time not neglecting to clean up the debt mountain. When the new financial law passes, he predicts, employment should benefit from government  incentives, and the Italians' tax burden will decrease by about 2 percentage points. Next year more can be done, he says, and public debt will drop in 2016 "although the low rate of inflation is of concern," he admits.

     

     

    The same bill under debate also deals with pension plans. A crucial problem which must be faced regards the "esodati," or those left entirely without income because let go from jobs before reaching pensionable age, which in many cases means a wages gap of a decade. Under study, but not until next year, is a plan to offer the over-63 years of age part-time paid work. Another problem under debate, given the financial limitations of the national pension plan INPS, is whether the state can afford workers choosing early retirement with a reduced pension.

    Also under heated public debate is the fact that the government makes money from gambling. In Italy gaming is possible in 22,000 places, from casinos and bingo halls to simple slot machines tucked into a cafe corner. Many Italians object to the fact that the state makes money from what they consider a vice, and an encouragement to the weaker members of the public to become betting addicts. Gambling has been described as Italy's third biggest industry, involving at least $100 billion and giving employment to 120,000. According to one survey, 55% of those playing, even occasionally, fall below the poverty line.

     

     
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    Rome Mayor Hounded From Office


    ROME -- After two years and four months in office, Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino has finally caved in and resigned, presumably definitively. Akin to Hilary Clinton's run for the Democratic nomination being dogged by her email scandal, Marino has been hounded from office over six restaurant receipts claimed as official entertaining, but apparently personal.

    The receipt that triggered the greatest public outrage was from a pricy downtown Roman restaurant where, said the owner, Marino's wife had made their reservation at 3 pm. That evening among other shockers the Mayor ordered a bottle of wine that cost some $65. To ensure that the restaurant owner actually recognized Signora Marino, the reporter who broke the story first showed him a photo of another woman, whom he did not recognize.



    Marino reacted to this news scandal by offering to repay $23,000 worth of the sums he had charged on his official as opposed to his private credit card. But it was too little and too late, and many here assume that his very offer amounted to an admission of guilt, even though in some Italian cities it is the norm for a mayor to place all charges on the offical credit card, then have a subordinate deduct private transactions from the total for repayment.



    In truth, much of the harsh reaction against Marino is due to the slow progress in Roman preparations for the Jubiliee year called by Pope Francis to open Dec. 8. The Pope himself, advocate of mercy, came down hard on Marino, denying in September that, when the mayor flew to New York to hear the pontiff address the United Nations, the pope had actually invited him. In other words, the pontiff called the mayor of Rome a liar. With this even his own party, the Partito Democratic (PD), and its president, Premier Matteo Renzi, turned their backs on Marino.



    On Tuesday the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian tax police, ransacked the mayor's office on the Capitoline Hill and took away all files they considered relevant to the mayor's expense account for his official entertaining, which totals $259,000, according to city hall official accountants. A prosecutor will go over these, so we are told.



    One reader's reaction was to confide to a Roman daily his shock at Marino's having put on his official city expense account the $10 he had given to a starving immigrant -- i.e., that this is all silliness. And indeed there are two sides to every story, even to this one. Although no one is defending private entertaining at public expense, Marino is not lacking in defenders.



    First, Marino inherited, not years, but decades of Roman city mismanagement which, as is known only now, was intimately involved with organized crime, sometimes even under the guise of welfare programs. Moreover, as the investigations into the Vatican's own bank, the IOR, have demonstrated, until only recently the Vatican bankers were accused of money laundering, and for decades were not above taking their cut in the dodgy finances of dodgy individuals. Under Pope Francis's cleanup over 1,000 IOR accounts in the names of laymen with no right to hold Vatican bank accounts have been shut down. That a part of the Roman church worked hand in glove with corrupt politicians for many years is no secret.



    Secondly, whereas Marino is acknowledged as ultra clean personally, when newly elected he found himself surrounded by corrupt bureaucrats of high rank with links to organized crime, as he himself denounced not long after taking office. Among recent arrests have also been members of the PD -- that PD which turned its back on Marino.



    Last Dec. 3 thirty-seven with city hall links and/or offices were arrested on Mafia charges, including the head of the city hall anti-corruption team. Marino's predecessor as mayor for over 5 years, Gianni Alemanno, whose political career began when he was elected national secretary of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, was put under investigation in connection with -- again among other things -- the city's payments for buses which in fact never arrived.



    "We have added 700 buses to the city and hired 200 new bus drivers," Mario said on a recent radio broadcast. "Do you think I'm proud to admit to my peers in other cities that my predecessor as mayor is under investigation for Mafia activities?"



    Marino, a surgeon from Genoa, is aalsoaccused of being an amateur in politics, who has failed to move swiftly or incisively enough within the Roman labyrinth. Perhaps -- but if his being an outsider is in some ways a handicap, it is exactly why he was elected. In fairness, the Vatican itself might have taken into account that to clean up the decades of Roman pot holes, piled-up rubbish and broken sidewalks would require more than the eight months permitted by the pontiff's surprise last-minute announcement of the Jubilee Year on March 13.



    That Premier Renzi is as distressed as the Vatican at the slow work on the Jubilee preparations is understandable if belated. What he says today is that he wants a "dream team -- some really tough people" -- to take charge. Hmm.



    Finally, and this is doubtless peripheral, restaurateurs here have savagely attacked Marino forcing them to remove their ever proliferating tables, which are illegal squatters on Roman sidewalks.



    So what now? The most frequently mentioned possible successors are a magistrate with political experience, Alfonso Sabella, and Carabinieri General Leonardo Gallitelli.
  • Art & Culture

    Tending to the Heritage

    ROME – It has become a truism that Italy has neglected its vast heritage in recent years, but things are looking up. Beginning with Pompeii, the important news is that a team of medical researchers has made CAT scans of the skeletal remains of no less than 30 individuals who died in the eruption of 79 AD. Unlike an X-ray machine, the laser CAT (computerized axial tomography) scan works by building up a series of images which virtually reconstruct the body. In this case, working for the archaeological superintendency of Pompeii headed by Massimo Osanna, a team from the Amsterdam-based Philips SpA Healthcare company used this layer technology to peer through and photograph no less than 16 layers of recently restored plaster casts of bodies so as to build up the series of images into a three-dimensional picture.

     

    Among the objectives was to learn, through serious scientific research of the skeletons  concealed within plaster casts, more about the ancient Roman diet. The plaster casts were first made in the 1860s when the former hothead revolutionary patriot archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli took over management of Pompeii on behalf of newly unified Italy. In 1853 an excavator at Herculaneum had dug up animal skeletons found inside hollows. The skeletons were all that remained after the organic matter had disintegrated within the solidified volcanic matter, which with rainfall had become a light-weight cement. It was Fiorelli’s idea to pour plaster into these hollows, then crack away the cement-like shell. What he found still stuns the world. Inside a new covered structure in the Pompeii amphitheater the plaster casts are arranged to be seen: a mother clutching her child, a man raised up on his elbow in a last gasp.

    Among the findings of this initial study phase was that the ancient Pompeiians had good quality teeth, presumably because their diet was healthy and poor in sugars, but that their bones showed damage from fluorine found naturally in the water at Pompeii. “The density of the plaster made the CAT scan complicated,” Osanna told the press. “The density is almost as great as that of the skeleton.” Conducting the research are not only radiologists and archaeologists, but also dentists, engineers and, in hopes of learning more about life and social classes at ancient Pompeii, anthropologists as well.

    Interest in the ancient diet is reflected in recent onsite research by University of Cincinnatti archaeologists under Prof. Steve Ellis, who have been analyzing findings in the sewer systems of both Herculaneum and Pompeii. A surprising discovery was the amount of prepared foods used there, and especially cereals. “These materials have revealed a clear socio-economic distinction between the activities and consumer habits of every home owner,” according to Ellis. “Along with the less expensive cereals, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish and eggs we have come upon traces of the much more costly salted meats and fish imported from Spain.” Even the residue of (obviously imported) giraffe meat was found by the Cincinnatti University team.

    Restorations of the site of Pompeii continue after considerable water damage in the past few years, but Pompeii is not alone. Progress also continues at the majestic  Villa Augustea, which lies inland behind Mount Vesuvius at Starza Regina, a village near the town of Somma Vesuviana. Despite lying at the foot of Vesuvius, the villa was not destroyed by the eruption that suffocated Pompeii and Herculaneum.

    There for the past 13 years archaeologists from both Naples and Japan have already excavated some 2,000 sq. m. of the villa, or one-fifth of its entirety. “We are bringing to light a very large ancient Roman site where it is believed the Emperor Augustus died,” says archaeologist Antonio De Simone of the Suor Orsola Benincasa University at Naples. The team from the University of Tokyo is headed by Prof. Masanori Aoyagi, working with Prof. De Simone in what is known as the multidisciplinary Apolline Project. A visit to the villa has already attracted some 70,000 tourists particularly interested in seeing state-of-the-art archaeological findings and a new site.

    The largest area found so far is a vast hall with on one side a colonnade and, in a wall, two huge niches for statues and, nearby, fine floor mosaics. Wall paintings reflecting the worship of the wine god Dionysius and an exceptionally beautiful marble statue of the god, holding in his arm a baby panther, reflect the archaeologists’ finding that the 10,000 sq. m. estate surrounding the huge villa could produce the exceptional amount of 100,000 liters of wine every year, according to De Simone.

    “This extraordinary discovery makes us reconsider the entire history of the cultivation of grapes and wine-making in the whole area,” says Francesco Mosca, president of the Somma Vesuviana Pro Loco, adding that the wall paintings discovered date from the Third century AD, “a period about which we know relatively little.”

    The villa was first discovered in the 1930s when farmers happened upon the upper portions of the walls of the villa. At that time precious fragments of statues, wall paintings and mosaics were also found, but when the Somma residents appealed to Mussolini in Rome for funding for excavation, they were turned down.

    Post script: those who read Italian and have a special interest in Pompeii may wish to read journalist Francesco Erbani’s Pompei, Italia which studies the recent problems of management and conservation of the site.
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    The U.S.A.: A first for Pope Francis

    All recent popes had visited the United States before being elected to the papacy, but for Pope Francis this is his first ever visit. Like all his foreign excursions, it is somewhat rushed – there will be no time for lingering, for his schedule is densely packed with appointments. It is also limited to the East Coast, and, at a scant six days, relatively brief.

    One of its crucial moments is his address to a joint session of Congress Thursday, when he is
    expected to include praise for the integration in the U.S. of migrants in a genuinely multicultural world. This will appear in sharp contrast to the present disoriented attempts in Europe to manage the hordes of migrants arriving from wartorn Syria, Irak, Eritrea and East and West Africa.

    Fresh from his visit to Cuba, in addressing the Republican-dominated Congress, Pope Francis will also have to calibrate carefully his words about ending the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Not least, he is expected to try to correct the popular perception in America of his criticism of the capitalist system, made during his South American tour last summer. At that time he denounced the “unfettered pursuit of money,” which he dismissed as the “dung of the Devil.”

    Although he is the first pope to come from the Americas, the whole of his previous life reflects his birth in Argentina and career within the Latino Church. A question asked here in Rome is whether he was intentionally avoiding a visit to the United States.

    Nevertheless, the U.S. contains a microcosm of his the world which he knows best, with a Catholic Church whose membership is becoming increasingly Latino, but whose hierarchy in the U.S. remains anchored in historic past migrations of Irish, Poles, German and other European Catholic descendants. Only 10% of U.S. Catholic bishops are of Latino extraction, and fewer than 10% of its priests. But Pope Francis is using his U.S. visit to Washington, New York and Philadelphia above all to embrace a broader context.

    For him, to address both Houses of Congress in a joint session and world leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York is a unique opportunity. His larger goal is to add his personal plea for action to combat climate change; to clarify the church’s teaching on social and economic issues; and, in Philadelphia on the occasion of the meeting of world families, to prepare world Catholic opinion for the forthcoming make-or-break Synod session on the family, which opens immediately upon his return to Rome.

    At the end of this Synod, Pope Francis will have to decide whether to change Church teaching on the admission of divorced couples to Communion. This is a question which has become of deafening importance for many Catholics in Europe and America, who find themselves in situations considered by the Church to be irregular.

    Interspersed with the big set pieces of the visit --  his meeting with President Obama, his addresses to Congress and to the United Nations and the canonization of California’s first saint at the national shrine in Washington, Father Junipero Serra – are a series of visits to the poor and the marginalized, always the central focus of Pope Francis’s ministry. Among these are a visit to a correctional center in Philadelphia, and to a school in Harlem.

    During his visit he will be riding triumphantly on popularity figures unequalled by any American politician or any other world politician, as polls show. He will be assured of a huge audience waiting expectantly to catch even the smallest glimpse of him. But there are also cohorts of discouraged Catholics who have been shocked by the sexual abuse scandals and the inability of the Vatican to discipline bishops who have been recycling priests who molest children. Others disagree entirely with the Church positions on birth control and on gay relationships.  
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    Expo Triumphs – But So Does Off Expo

    After a slightly slow start, the Expo world fair in Milan is packing them in. In late June, when Expo had been open less than 60 days, some 100,000 visitors arrived daily. By late summer, the daily arrivals had risen to between 130,000 to 150,000, peaking the week of Sept. 14 to 20 with well over 1 million visitors.

    On a single day, Sunday, Sept. 10, almost 242,000 surged into the site. As a result, as one Milanese reporter complained, at particularly popular pavilions the lines of people waiting under the hot sun were “interminable,”  and indeed “monstrous.”

    The longest wait that day – reportedly seven hours – was to see the fascinating Japanese pavilion. Doubtless a seven-hour wait was an exaggeration, but certainly the line was long. All the better, then, that there is not only Expo, but, just like Broadway, there is also an Off Expo, and not only in Milan, echoing the central theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.”

    One of the more tantalizing of the Off Expo exhibitions is called “Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,” or “Give us this day our daily bread.”  On view and celebrating the earth, the gathering of foodstuffs and food itself is a collection of folk paintings called “ex votos” or votive offerings which date from 1600 to 1900, and come from every corner of Italy, but also from Austria and Mexico.

    Ex votos are typically informal testimonial paintings, often on wood or glass, which give thanks for the divine intervention that has saved someone from a horrible accident, such as a child fallen into a well, but miraculously rescued. The ex votos on view also document farm life – the joy of a good harvest saved from a fire or from a hail storm, a sick cow restored to good health, huge pumpkins unharmed after tumbling from a train car, the transhumance when, before the snows set in, flocks were walked down from mountain pastures to the warmer South.

    Sponsor is the Per Grazie Ricevute Foundation, and the venue is the exhibition space at Via San Marco 12, Milan. Through Oct. 31, 2015, with free entry. Open Monday through Friday from 10 am to 6 pm; Saturday 2 pm to 6 pm; and Sundays, 10 am to 1 pm.

    What would be nutrition without bees? “Hive,” the UK pavilion at Expo itself, shows an idyllic orchard and wildflower garden within big honeycombed walls. In it is a gilded steel sphere, designed by artist Wolfgang Buttress, that resembles a beehive, and pulsates and buzzes like one as well. The German Expo pavilion too has landscapes on acrylic glass screens with giant insect eyes overhead that view the exhibit as if from a bee’s perspective.

    Bees are at the heart of the 13th edition of La Conserva della Neve, a three-day exhibition with lectures, concerts and a market for garden enthusiasts and specialists, held within the Parco dei Daini at Villa Borghese and sponsored by the Rome city Superintendent of Culture. On show, offer and discussion were lessons for children on how to climb trees safely, olive oils, hand-woven linens, handsome garden huts, seeds and bulbs, antique garden furniture, hand-painted ceramics decorated with foods and flowers and, not least, honey of all kinds.

    Indeed, the centerpiece of the park area was a beehive – a huge tent of transparent netting containing a hive of 40,000 bees. Also inside the tent: talented young musician-composers playing, depending upon the hour, a grand piano or an electronic viola. The concert hours were chosen so as to coincide with the bees’ most active times of day, and the musicians – carefully covered in all-white outfits including big masks – improvised by interacting with the variations in the humming of the bees.  
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    Back to School Daze

    This was back-to-school week for no less than ninety million young Italians, among them 216,000 with serious disabilities. With almost 1.2 million youngsters from pre-school through high school, Lombardy took first place among the regions for the largest number of students. But more important than the numbers is that this September marks the first test for the application of a modernizing school law passed by Parliament in July.

    “This is the first step of schools taking a new role as a focal point of government attention,” said Education Minister Stefania Giannini. Still, a major objection to the reform bill is that teachers are being sent at some distance from their homes. But, put into action, most accepted transfer, albeit not for another year.

    Premier Matteo Renzi has dubbed the reform “The Good School” (La Buona Scuola), and this is one of the successful reforms which the government of Matteo Renzi can boast about, even though, as the vote became finalized, both Minister for Constitutional Reform Maria Elena Boschi and Giannini were was assailed by the left wing of Renzi’s Partito Democratico, plus other parties and unions, especially but not only the teachers unions. In an effort to block the bill, over 2,600 amendments had been dragged into the debate, which nevertheless passed, 277 to 173 votes.

    A pleased Renzi predicted that the new legislation will make the schools an “engine” for Italian development. (Renzi’s wife, coincidentally, is a teacher, and has not transferred with her husband to Rome but continued to teach Latin and Italian in a high school in Florence).

    Those hired for temporary positions may be transferred to relatively distant schools, a factor which aggravates many. Above all teachers in the South of Italy are resisting transfer to schools in the North. However, in the Lazio Region around Rome 80% are accepting transfers before August 1916 and, in Turin, 60%.

    In what is a true novelty for Italy, top performers will receive a merit bonus, thanks to the applicatio of evaluation criteria rather than automatic teaching career advancement, as applied until now. The ambitious new law aimed at updating an outmoded system also deals with the way teachers are hired and the educational preparation of teachers themselves.

    To eliminate the waiting lists for positions that have sometimes lasted decades, some 100,000 teachers are to be given permanent positions; in order to become one of these, a docente di ruolo, the candidate must pass a competitive exam. Private sector funding is to be allowed, with individual schools competing against each other for private resources, even though this too is hotely contested as favoring the wealthier school districts (see: >>> ).

    As in recent years, the new classes include a certain number of children of migrants. Indeed, in the Manzoni elementary school in Brescia two classes were made up of solely migrant children, without a single Italian in class. Each class of 17 and 18 students respectively had pupils from China, India, Moldavia, Pakistan and the Philippines. “Some have just arrived in Italy and don’t speak Italian,” Mario Maviglia, director for provincial schools, told a local newspaper. “We hope that we’ll get some help because otherwise we won’t be able to function. Perhaps a single school in the center of town where all the foreign children can go would be a good idea.”

    Brescia is the North Italian city where 3,000 marched earlier this year asking for work permits for migrants. Their march was contested by right-wingers waving  banners with slogans like “Brescia for the Bresciani, take back our city,” and wound up in a pitched battle with police. Addressing the Brescia situation, Matteo Salvini of the Northern League protested in a TV debate that there should be a maximum number of foreign students per class, “or there will be no integration of the foreigners, who will continue not to speak Italian.” One theory under discussion is that no more than 30% of students in any class should be non-Italians.

    State schooling has existed since 1859, shortly after unification of Italy, but it was 1962 before education through middle school became obligatory for all. Only after 2004 was a nationwide test, which had been obligatory for entry into a high school, dropped. Today’s high school, also known as an upper secondary school, lasts five years, or up to age 19.
     

    Despite the complaints you can hear on every street corner or in any school corridor, as of 2013 the Italian secondary school education was ranked twenty-first worldwide by an OECD-coordinated Programme for International Student Assessment – that is, Italy placed higher than the OECD average worldwide and higher than the United States.
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    On Reforms, Premier Renzi Risks a Showdown


    ROME – Back in ancient Rome players in a dice game used the phrase, “O la va o la spacca.” In one translation this means “Make it or break it;” in another, “Either piss or get off the pot.” It certainly means to go for broke,  and in his frustration at lack of completion of the crucial reforms which are the hallmark of his governing project, Premier Matteo Renzi risks approaching just this sort of showdown.

    The obstreperous left wing of his own Partito Democratico (PD) is basically blocking the two major items on Renzi’s reform agenda. The first is an ambitious Constitutional change that would slash the size of the Senate and, no less importantly, its power over legislation already passed in the Chamber of Deputies. Future senators would not be directly elected by Italian voters. Pared down to fewer than one-third of its present 315 members who serve six-year terms (plus another five or more appointed senators), would be a compilation of people elected to the regional assemblies plus the mayors of some cities. The Senate could not pronounce on major legislation, but would be “excluded from co-participation in the political directives and votes of confidence for the government.” (For details, see: >>>)



    The second bill, dubbed the “Italicum,” calls for reform of the election procedure. In Renzi’s plans the Italicum is crucial, but still takes less precedence than Senate reform, which he wants to see passed within October, while also promising that it will be subject to a future popular referendum.



    In theory, Renzi has a slender majority of from six to 10 votes in the Senate, but his in-house opposition to Senate reform, with up to 30 votes, would trounce his reform bill. This opposition leader is Renzi’s predecessor as party chief, Pierluigi Bersani, backed by some intellectuals and by the party’s traditionally leftist trade unionist component. They insist that senators be popularly elected and argue that, regarding any such important change in the Italian Constitution, an individual’s conscience outweighs party discipline.



    “But this is not a question of party discipline,” Renzi retorted Wednesday. “Let’s not go to the barricades!” For Renzi, under the present rules of the Constitution, bills must be approved in both Chamber and Senate with exactly the same wording, or sent back for another round. This means that the Senate can easily and simply block any bill brought before it, even bringing the legislative process to a full stop.



    The proposed new Senate would have some echoes of the Bundesrat (the Senate equivalent in Germany) in giving larger regions relatively more senators than small regions – “a re-equilibrating in favor of the larger regions, which would have more representatives or votes,” in the words of Jorg Luther, professor of constitutional law at the Piemonte Orientale University. The result is that, says Prof. Luther, “Over the long term the veto power of the Bundesrat has decreased, showing a tendency that could be useful also for Italy.”



    And there is more trouble because of serious obstruction from outside Renzi’s governing area. A total of 513,450 amendments have been tacked onto the Senate reform bill, and merely to print these proposed amendments has required 55,000 sheets of paper printed on both sides. Of the total, 510,000 amendments were drafted (so to speak: in fact, computer-drafted sometimes with only tiny changes in wording) by Roberto Calderoli of the Northern League. As a result, only one print-out is being made, and the 28 members of the Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Commission, headed by the PD’s capable Anna Finocchiaro, will review the amendments, one by one, on a big screen and on i-pads. At present, 134 amendments have been approved, 62 in the Senate and 72 in The Chamber.



    How Renzi will deal with the Senate reform bill, when it finally reaches the Senate floor, is unknown. As one editorial writer predicts, , “This time there will be winners and losers.” Perhaps the most serious risk, if no mediated solution is found, is for new elections to be called two years ahead of time, even as the Lega’s Matteo Salvini (15.1% in the latest polls) and the Movimento Cinque Stelle’s Beppe Grillo (25.9% and growing)  are madly campaigning, a fact that may help bring peace between the two warring clans of the PD.



    Bersani is promising that mediation is possible, but just where this clash is heading is unclear. Some are calling Renzi’s majority within the PD “the Premier’s party,” as if it were already autonomous and in opposition to the traditional Partito Democratico. Most importantly, with these two stumbling blocks – the PD opposition and the avalanche of amendments -- what will be the future of the government if the reform bill flops? Will it bring down the government itself, as some fear?



    As a recent Reuters news agency report has pointed out, “Renzi came to power last year promising to revitalise Italy, a country which has had 63 government in almost as many years and whose economy has scarcely grown since it became a founder member of the euro zone 16 years ago.”
  • Op-Eds

    Rome’s Mayor & the Jubilee Year Called by Pope Francis




    ROME – Gearing up for the Jubilee Year called by Pope Francis for Dec. 8, the City of Rome is cleaning up its act (and some of its streets). The problem is the recent, devastating wave of scandals known as “Mafia Capitale” (Mafia Capital), which showed crime and corruption extending from shifty politicians and bureaucrats all the way down to organized crime bosses. Is there time, money and will power enough to be ready in just three months? The answer is a qualified yes – but it will not be easy.



    No one has ever accused Marino, a transplant surgeon from Genoa, of being a part of the invasion of Rome by the barbarians of crime. This is a  problem which he inherited from his predecessor as mayor, Gianni Alemanno. But he has taken the rap, blamed both for having allegedly ignored the dimensions of the question, and for having failed to act swiftly enough. Marino denies both charges, pointing out that in August 2013 the then prefect of Rome had flatly denied the existence in the Eternal City of Mafia-type activities, acknowledging solely “facts and behavior that were linked to organized crime.” When this was shown to be untrue, literally dozens were sent to prison.



    On this Mayor Marino does not mince his words. “The extraordinary commitment of Prefect Gabrielli, the determination and disregard to threats we have received from [crime bosses at] Ostia, and the new awareness of the presence of the metastatic cancer in our midst, are encouraging all the democratic powers to unite to combat these phenomena, which are clearly mafiosi. Today my voice is less isolated.”



    Marino is a survivor. For a time the scandal risked the dissolution of his city government, and replacement with an appointed commissioner. It was a victory for Marino when, instead of dissolving the city council and sending Marino himself back to Genoa, a commission of inquiry decided to take no further action than to have him act in concert with Franco Gabrielli, 55, from Viareggio, the new prefect of Rome.



    The role of the prefect will be to preside over the legality of contracts preparing Rome for the Jubilee year. Gabrielli, former secret service (SISDE) boss and then head of the Civil Protection agency, thus becomes Dr. Marino’s partner cum overseer in managing a cleaner Rome. Will the two get on, and will the vaunted cleanup – physical as well as of personnel – make a difference?



    The question is important because predictions are that the Jubiliee Year will attract 33 million pilgrims, or from 50,000 to 100,000 a day, to the Eternal City. Initially 25 million were expected, but the figure is ballooning. The real crowd control challenge on the ground is expected for the week of Feb. 8, when the remains of Padre Pio will be installed inside St. Peter’s basilica, with a special day of prayer Feb. 13.  Safety too is a high priority, and plans are to disallow overflights of Rome, including and especially by ultra-light aircraft.



    Nevertheless, even as Marino met in New York Wednesday with his fellow big city mayor Bill De Blasio, back home there was little let-up in the attacks on him. In mid-August Marino left Rome for a two-week family vacation. Given the Jubilee walkup tensions, the new prefect Gabrielli openly criticized Marino’s two-week absence even though, ending his vacation in Manhattan, Marino said that in New York he was meeting with potential investors. “Certainly he did not do well by not being here,” said a petty-sounding Gabrielli. “I respect his mentality as a surgeon – that is, of one who gives his all at work, but when he thinks he should, takes a rest, probably to regenerate himself.” (Marino replied that the hard-working deputy mayor Marco Causi had remained.)



    A comparison between Jubilee Rome and Expo in Milan has been made because both run-up’s have been tinged with evidence of corruption. This Jubilee budget is trifling by comparison with that of Expo; no major works are planned for Rome. Nor is there a comparison with the Jubilee Year of 2000, which called for far more ambitious projects. The 33 contracts negotiated so far, which will be put on line, mostly regard that regular maintenance which has been sorely neglected: the tidying up of bridges, sidewalks and the area around the Stazione Termini, Rome’s major train station. Another project is being called percorsi di fede (pilgrim walks), which will take the visitor from St. Peter’s to other ancient basilicas.



    One quarrel is with the tour bus operators. In order to maintain orderly traffic (including for workaday Romans), city officials and police expect pilgrims to walk. But many are elderly and/or handicapped, so buses will be necessary for them, but Rome’s traffic commissioner is asking around $1,150 per bus as a congestion charge, a fee the companies find exorbitant.



  • Tourism

    Revolution Sweeps Italian Museums



    ROME – In a radical change of policy, the Italian government has just appointed twenty new directors for museums and archaeological sites from Milan to Paestum. The selection, announced Aug. 18, includes seven foreigners. Topping the list is German art historian Eike Schmidt, 47, who takes over directing the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, with 2 million visitors every year. But not everyone is thrilled at the sweep of this new cultural broom.
     
    The Italian press has dubbed the move “revolutionary,” and so it is. For the first time in the history of Italian state museums, the selections are not made from among the art historians in the employ of the Ministry of Culture, save for one. The aim of Culture Minister Dario Franceschini is to improve the quality of management of the museums, but also – so say his critics – to say, and loudly, that “We’re turning a page. These twenty nominees of such high international scientific standing signify renewal after decades of delay.”
     
    On the other hand, as Italy’s most authoritative archaeologist Salvatore Settis – who himself directed a state museum in Turin – it’s fine to have new museum manager-directors, but the problems remain that museum funding was slashed back in 2008 and has not been restored, as were the number of their employees. Moreover, says Settis, those who have worked as curators are not necessarily good directors. “Not one of the foreign appointees has been director of a large museum, and some have never even worked in  one.”
     
    The selections were made by a committee headed by Paolo Baratta. Interviewed, Baratta said that, “Outside of Italy an articulated career exists, but here in Italy either you’re a director or a custodian.” Among his committee’s criteria for selecting which museums was their role in research. Money also matters: “Outside of Italy museum directors can also do fund-raising,” he pointed out. Visitors to Italian museums have inceased this year over last, to judge by the first quarter, by almost 10%, with income surging by almost 13% over the same period.
     
    Italian citizens have joined in the debate. For the move is  Ugo Baistrocchi, writing that, “Minister Franceschini has done well to name seven Europeans [i.e., non-Italians] to direct the most important Italian museums, but why not do the same for cinema, spectacle and tourism?” Mariaurelia Viotti of Genova disagrees: “I don’t understand this love for the foreigner, which damages us – why should a foreigner be better entitled to head the Uffizi rather than a notable Italian?”
     
    Becoming the first non-Italian director of the Uffizi since the museum was opened in 1769, Eike Schmidt leaves the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where he has been curator and department director. He has also worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at Sotheby’s auction house in London.  Another appointee with long experience is Canadian-born James Bradburne, 59, whose nine successful years as director of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence have made him familiar among Italians. Bradburne will head the Brera Pinacoteca in Milan. Peter Aufreiter, 40, Austrian and a graduate in art history from Vienna, takes over the Galleria delle Marche at Urbino. 
     
    Among the other non-Italians is art historian Sylvain Bellenger of France, who leaves the Chicago Art Institute to direct the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Peter Assmann, 61, who is Austrian, takes over the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua; for ten years he was president of the Association of Austrian Museums. The youngest, at 34, is German archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who will head the important classical site of Paestum; with broad international experience for his age, he has recently been teaching Greco-Roman art at the University of Basilicata. German-born Cecilie Hollberg, 48, comes from the Stadtisches Museum of Brunswick, which she directed, and will take over the Gallery of the Accademia in Florence.
     
    The Italian Paolo Giulierini, archeologist, 46, goes to the National Archeological Museum in Naples. Carmelo Malacrino, 44, archaeologist and architect born in Catanzaro, assumes direction of the National Archeological Museum at Reggio Calabria. Siena-born Marco Pierini, 49, will direct the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. Mauro Felicori, 63, originally from Bologna, assumes direction of the Reggia at Caserta.
     
    In addition to Hollberg, the other female nominees are Anna Coliva, 62, just renewed as director of the Borghese Gallery, which she has headed, with kudos, since 2006; she is the sole Culture Ministry appointee. From Cagliari, Cristiana Collu, 46, comes to  the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome from museums in Trento and Nuoro. Paola Marini, 63, passes from directing Verona’s Civic Art Museums to the Accademia Galleries in Venice. Martina Bagnoli, 51, had worked for the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and in Baltimore, and will head the Galleria Estense in Modena. Paola D’Agostino, 43, leaves the Yale University Art Gallery to head the Bargello Museum in Florence. Art historian Martina Bagnoli, 51, goes from Bolzano to the Galleria Estense. The new director of the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome is Flaminia Gennari Santori, 47, art historian.
     
    At 39 the second youngest, Eva Degl’Innocenti will direct the National Archaeological Museum at Taranto; she comes to Taranto from the Breton Museum. Serena Bertolucci, 48 and an art historian born at Camogli, will direct the Palazzo Reale of Genoa. The new director of the Polo Reale of Turin is Enrica Pagella, 58, born at Ivrea.
     
    (For full mini-biographies of the foreigners selected, see, in Italian >>>)

      

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